Excavated with moderate pitting, still solid though mildly bent,
appears to have been gently acid cleaned.

Mid-Viking Age sword with simple "bar" guards of
unadorned iron characteristic of Petersen's type M with a pattern
welded blade inlaid in iron with symbols on one side. As is expected
with a hilt of this type, this sword lacks a pommel. This is a
very common type, representing about twenty-three percent of those
cataloged in Jakobsson's
(1992) dissertation (p. 210 - 211, 222), with 409 examples
of type M swords being from Norway, mostly in the south, out of
a total of 432 of this type.

In British works concerning Viking swords, which will have
been the sources most English language readers will have turned
to, it has long been asserted that iron inlays are not found on
pattern-welded blades, and the truth of this in British material
was confirmed by Lang
and Ager's (1989) radiographic study. However, Viking Age
swords with both iron inlays and pattern-welding are frequently
seen in material from "continental" Europe, such as
this example. This sword (M.1) shows, in its central shallow fullered
zone, two wide bands of pattern-welding, of straight herringbone
character on each side of the blade. On one side only, near the
hilt, an iron inlay
is present in the form of two omega-like symbols, their bases
joined at an imaginary line perpendicular to the length of the
blade such that each is a mirror image of the other.

The blade is slightly bent, without being twisted, by not more
than one or two degrees, first within a few centimeters of the
hilt and then in the opposite direction in the mid-portion of
the blade. One side of the blade, that without an inlay, shows
a much greater degree of pitting and corrosion than the opposite
side. The relative degree of corrosion continues on the guards,
with the upper guard more spared than the lower. The tang shows
little corrosion on either side, presumably having been protected
for some time by a grip. Such a variation in the degree of corrosion
from one side to the other is commonly seen, in my experience,
in river finds.